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I believe that many of those who “held their noses” and voted for Trump believe that he didn’t really mean all of the vile things he said and that he’s actually going to be a normal President. Why would they think that? Because Trump is a white man, and our white male supremacist culture trains…

Yesterday from 12:15 to about 2:15 in the afternoon, I marched with about a thousand other people from the spot where Mike Brown was killed up to West Florissant, then down to Chambers and concluding at Greater St. Marks, the former Catholic church St. Sebastian, which has become a gathering point for many of the…

Back on August 8, 2012, I published a piece on Occasional Planet in which I pondered the intense hatred that President Barack Obama inspires in some quarters. After considering several possible sources of that antipathy, like many others I concluded that racial prejudice must be the primary motivator. Today at the New Yorker blog, Philip…

Remember in 2008 when the process of running for President seemed to drain John McCain of most of the qualities that had once made him appealing to independents and even some liberals? Timothy Egan’s brilliant piece at the New York Times suggests that something similar has happened to Mitt Romney: Romney[‘s] story is laden with…

During the administration of George W. Bush, I remember feeling a more or less chronic sense of despair and incredulity at the state my country was in. Lots of my friends felt the same way. And many others in this nation and in the world felt similarly. The distinguished historian Eric Foner wrote a Washington…

Visiting Disney World with my family last week, I took in the show at the Hall of Presidents in the Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Square. After browsing through a small collection of Presidential memorabilia in the lobby of the theater (including a childhood autobiography Richard Nixon wrote in 1925 and a replica of the cowboy boots…

In Memphis, they’ve turned the hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered into a museum honoring the Civil Rights Movement. Across the South, “Civil Rights tourism” is on the rise. Though not without ambiguities and controversy, this development at its best may represent an attempt to acknowledge the sins of the past, the courage of…

The other day I took a bike ride along the Riverfront Trail in St. Louis. The trail runs north from Laclede’s Landing, following the Mississippi until it crosses over the river at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Winding through flood walls, junkyards, at least one homeless encampment, and other industrial sites, the trail offers…

Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published in 1965 two issues on “The Negro American.” Some 56 years later, in 2011, the journal has published a kind of follow-up, a two-volume issue on race in the age of Obama. The first issue, edited by Washington University’s own Gerald Early, takes…

Watching the coverage of President Obama’s speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden, I find myself in agreement with various friends (on Facebook and elsewhere) who have expressed uneasiness with the crowing over this development. I’m uneasy with the celebration of an assassination, leery of reprisals, and put off by the tackiness of citizens singing…